Monthly Archives: January, 2009
You’re an idiot
I moderate a debate forum that’s reasonably active, usually anywhere from 10-30 people logged in at any time. One of the members, one who has been around for a while and has posted frequently, posted the following comment to another member.
“HeyU, you’re an idiot.”
I’m not providing too much context because not much is necessary to [...]
Our world may be a giant hologram
For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a [...]
Something to think freely about
P.Z. Myers and Daniel C. Dennett, in The Reality Club over at edge.org (H. Allen Orr for the defense), have penned rebuttals to Orr’s review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.You really should click over and read the whole interchange. Myers and Dennett are not at a loss for words, so it’s quite a lengthy [...]
The world’s only immortal animal
Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan, and it’s considered by scientists to be the only animal that cheated death.
Solitary organisms are (according to current belief) doomed to die, after they completed their life cycle. Hydrozoa are a huge class of predatory animals that live mostly in saltwater, closely related to jellyfish and corals. Eggs and sperm [...]
Atheism or Agnosticism
There’s a great deal of confusion when it comes to defining ourselves as either atheists or agnostics. I frequently hear a person say, “Since I can’t honestly say that gods absolutely do not exist, I guess I’m an agnostic.” Yet they’ll readily confess that they have no belief in specific gods like the Christian or [...]
U.K citizens…please enable remote desktop
If that last post doesn’t make you wonder if George Orwell only erred in the year he selected for his title, read on…
THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.
The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s [...]
A personal information hellhouse
The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone’s calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.
A cabinet decision to put the management of the multibillion pound [...]
Comment Platforms – A challenge to compare
As soon as I installed TweetDeck on my Linux partition today and fired it up, I noticed a Twitter reply from December 16th I hadn’t noticed before. So first I’ll apologize to db0 for my inattentiveness and now I’ll get to the substance of his Tweet.
Here is db0’s challenge:
But of course that’s not a proper [...]